It’s amazing how many sociopaths are out there dashing around, playing entrepreneur, and yelling into a phone about drilling-down — with what appears to be no idea how to actually get something amazing to market.
They sing themselves little songs and tell themselves little stories over ciabatta sandwiches and Excel, rhapsodizing about their personal Candyland where everybody starts using their goofy product because… just…because. It’s crazy. And it’s everywhere.
...An idea is no more useful than a coupon for a bag of sugar; show me the finished cake, then we’ll talk.
The bottom line is that if you don’t have an amazing, passionate idea and the means to make it superb, you’re probably just a douchebag with an expensive phone. And a stack of NDAs.
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giantlemondrop and his semi-recent cognitive dissonance about being a nouvelle Dallas development potentate (a deliberate overstatement, by the way), and has a lot to do with that vague discontent I have been feeling for some time about our best neutopian efforts (which in turn has to do with marketing and attention and technology but it is going to take me awhile to tie together all the threads). From In Conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson:There was a depression, so artists, who are certainly blameless in this, discovered low real estate prices and low rents, and they started to move up here. And the gap between the artists and the real estate developers has gotten very small in our modern times, down to where it's almost nothing...( more that has to do with what I'm really grappling with from an art-and-technology standpoint )
We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers. "Sustainable development"--that means very expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy or permaculture...just yuppie poseurism. It's fashionable to be green, but it's not at all fashionable to wonder about the actual working class and farming people and families that you’re dispossessing. This is a class war situation, and the artists are unfortunately not on the right side of the battle. If we would just honestly look at what function we're serving in this economy, I'm afraid we would see that we're basically shills for real estate developers.
:There are thousands of reasons why people write blogs. But it seems to me the biggest reason that drives the bloggers I read the most is, we're all looking for our own personal global microbrand. That is the prize. That is the ticket off the treadmill. And I don't think it's a bad one to aim for.I've started reading gapingvoid again recently after taking some time off (approx 9 months), and have been enjoying it immensely. We're thinking about the same kind of things he just puts them into words and cartoons much better.
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Now that I've done it, I'll tell you about laptopgiving.org and One Laptop Per Child's "Give One, Get One" deal. US/Canada only, and it comes out to $423.95 with shipping, $200 of which is deductible.The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege. Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.Whoever thought up this campaign is pretty genius. It works on a number of psychological and practical levels.
Many monsters stand between us & realization of Immediatist goals. For instance our own ingrained unconscious alienation might all to easily be mistaken for a virtue, especially when contrasted with crypto-authoritarian pap passed off as "community," or with various upscale versions of "leisure." Isn't it natural to take the dandyism noir of curmudgeonly hermits for some kind of heroic individualism, when the only visible contrast is Club Med commodity socialism, or the gemutlich masochism of the Victim Cults? To be doomed & cool naturally appeals more to noble souls than to be saved & cozy.
...What must be overcome is not individuality per se, but rather the addiction to bitter loneliness which characterizes consciousness in the 20th century (which is by & large not much more than a re-run of the 19th).
...The first & most innocent-seeming obstacle to any Immediatist project will be the "busyness" or "need to make a living" faced by each of its associates.
...Yes, perhaps it's true we can't "live" with a job -- although I hope we're grown-up enough to know the difference between life & the accumulation of a bunch of fucking gadgets.
This oft-neglected blog might appear to be solely about ARG marketing/gaming and digital art, but this thing I've labeled as "nonlinear" since 2001 is finding a new presence thanks to Twitter, Last.fm, etc. And this thing is getting a new name; I've been calling it Ambient Technology...I posted on my other blog today for the first time in a long time, particularly if you count more than just links...lots more to say in this area and I think that is the venue for it (as opposed to here). Two words of the day (phatic and osmotic) and pretty much the concept of the day over there.
The main constraint of Twitter is the length of post: 140 characters. Not always, but often I find myself wanting to communicate a lot with those 140 characters, and rely on context to fill in the gaps. For example, "About to go on a date with three women!" For most, this is obviously a joke, but what was really going on?! Later I post a drunk/snarky missive about being in a room of 9 lesbians. More context that might clue you in that if a man says he's on a date with lesbians, quotation marks really should be used around the word "date."Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
perpetual slum, cataclysmic use, unslumming slum, high ground coverages, planning for vitality, secondary diversity, fashionable pocket, mixed primary uses, border vacuums, cataclysmic money, involuntary subsidies, street interruptions, disorganized complexity, orthodox planning, dwelling densities, incidental play, city diversity, primary diversity, sidewalk life, primary mixture, visual interruptions, gray belts, net acre, effective district, city public life
If my desktop printer understood the lessons of social software and Web 2.0, it wouldn’t be attached just to my computer or local network. It’d be accessible by my closest family and friends, too, regardless of where they lived. These people are my primary network, the folks for whom I’d put my neck on the line, and of course I’d let them use my paper and toner, just as I’d happily leave them with my house keys.
But what would this remote printing be used for?
My family would print me photos–currently the 3 of us have a shared folder just for pictures, because it’s easy to use and totally private, but an image landing in a folder doesn’t mirror its social importance to me.
My mum, instead of scanning newspaper clippings and emailing them to me (happily, her scanner has a single button that does that whole job), she would print them straight into my house.
My close friends would send me sketches, or print out long articles that I really must read. Yes, we can do this by email–but everyone in the world can send me articles by email. I have a much closer relationship with these people, so why doesn’t my computer support that?
It’s the desktop printer meets social software meets the fax machine, but in everyday life rather than the office. The printer is no longer a printer, it’s my social letterbox.
things i learned about myself or observed or said last night:I tend to have a lot of ideas, which is a kind way of saying that I’m easily distracted. The way I control this impulse is by recognizing that most ideas aren’t worth much without the solid execution to bring them into reality. So when I talk to someone about an idea, I will assess our ability to work together with a set of rules like this:( Read more... )Also, I was accused of being inappropriate/ineffectual because my board consists of three white men. Originally, diversity was a good idea -- difference creates difference! But what good does it do you to have multi-ethnic, multi-gendered people on your committee if they are all from the establishment?! Boards are like newspapers -- legacy*. They're the mainframes we have to deal with and might employ a few people while we create new solutions to new problems. They are, essentially, in the way, and in that sense need to be formed to best get out of the way. This is 2006, this is the 21st century...good ideas get turned into actions faster than ever, they get submitted to the commons of not just all ethnicities and genders but nationalities and geo-economic strata instantly ...and either absorbed and rewarded or chewed and spit and recycled like so many aluminum cans. While you are carefully selecting old money and power to have committee discussions about this or that world-changing idea, your idea is being done better by someone who is only worried about getting it done. They aren't thinking about marketing or budget or fame or status or career -- maybe in the back of their mind they are, but the thing is so demanding of their attention that they don't really have time for that kind of bullshit -- they aren't even thinking about sustainability**! If it doesn't work, they go back to doing whatever they did before, or do whatever comes next...whatever, because the idea is free, and for all our talking about the information economy, ideas by themselves are worth less than beer or milk or the computers we preserve them (the ideas) on or the time we take to do the preserving.
